The Free Spirit: Porete
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 18 July 2003
Mirror of Simple Souls
Marguerite Porete seems certainly a Béguine because so many sources gave her that designation. Between 1296 and January 1306, she wrote a book which was condemned and burned in her presence at Valenciennes. In Mirror of Simple Souls Marguerite Porete wrote that “a soul annihilated in the love of the Creator could, and should, grant to nature all that it desires”. She was burned as a heretic at the Place de Grieve in May 1310, but her book continued to be used by monks, and was attributed to Ruysbroeck. It was brought to England with the court of Philippa of Hainaut, when she arrived to marry Edward III in 1327.
The Mirror of Simple Souls postulates “seven states of grace” which lead up to the union of the soul with God. For Marguerite, only divine grace guides the soul to perfection. It first observes the Divine Commandments, then counsels of evangelical perfection as typified by Christ—these tasks overcoming “the will of the body”. The third stage is to gives up good works and destroy “the will of the spirit”. The fourth stage is a level of contemplation free of “all outward labors and obedience” and so abandoned to love that it thinks God has no greater gift to offer on earth. The soul is now ready for the spiritual part of its journey. The fifth state reduces the soul by Divine Goodness to humility and nothingness. Now the soul is mature, and without desires, wanting nothing. In the sixth state of “clarification”, God liberates and purifies it. The soul arrives at a state of “glorification” in the seventh step, when it leaves the body and achieves eternal glory and the perfection of paradise. The first six stages can take place “here below”, but the seventh, perfection, is the future, post mortem reception by God. The Perfect is therefore in Porete’s sixth step, and is not yet Perfect.
Marguerite says there is as much difference between each one of these states as between a drop of water and the ocean. The purpose of the book is to show the soul in the fifth and sixth states. She compares the “annihilated” or “liberated” soul to the angels. There are no intermediaries between its love and divine love, and the soul is also united with the Holy Trinity. Wherever it looks, God is to be found, and is within too.
In an early chapter the soul says a poem beginning, “virtues, I take leave of you forever”, which then becomes a recurrent theme. The gifts and comforts of God interfere with the process of liberation, and she says the soul “gives to nature, without remorse, all that it asks”, explaining that because of the soul’s transformation, nature is so well ordered that it does not demand anything prohibited. The soul does not take leave of the virtues to travel a path of immorality:
She is so far from the work of virtues that she no longer understands their language, but all the works of virtues are enclosed within the soul and obey her without contradiction.
In another passage “Reason” is astonished at the paradox of the soul taking leave of the virtues and yet still being with them, and “Love” patiently answers that if the soul was once the servant it has now become the master, but without any conflict—the virtues are always with the liberated soul and in perfect obedience. Marguerite’s accusers did not charge her with immorality and there is no evidence in her work that she advocated libertinism in any way.
Once the soul is unified with God it has no independent needs or desires. Its answer to all suggestions is, “No!” It needs neither salvation nor damnation, or anything at all. It needs none of the supposed aids to salvation—masses, sermons, fasts, or prayers, since God exists independently of all these. It “does not seek God by penance, nor by any sacrament of the Holy Church, nor by thoughts, words, or deeds”. Do not forget, Marguerite is talking about an already saved soul. In the earlier stages, it purged itself of these necessitites. Now it is saved by “faith without works”.
The Mirror distinguishes the liberated souls and those still under the dispensation of the Church. Marguerite even introduces a character, “Holy Church”, to be taught about liberated souls and admit such souls are above it. Elsewhere she distinguishes “Holy Church the Little”, governed by reason, and “Holy Church the Great”, governed by divine love. The community of liberated souls is the Holy Church and “Holy Church the Little” will not last much longer. This is an evident categorization of the Christian world into the established and the heretical churches. Marguerite constantly disparages the lesser Church. Her book was considered by some as simply anti-clerical.
Yet Marguerite concedes slightly to the established Church in that “Holy Church the Less” accepts that love dwells in the liberated souls not in itself, but the Church does not love, but commands and praises it in “the gloss of our scriptures”. The early stages in the soul’s journey toward perfection are traditional—obedience to the commandments and the imitation of Christ. The soul profits from its servitude to the virtues until it masters them. Liberation in perfection is not possible without servitude. The Mirror was meant only for those with “understanding”. Those with understanding had abandoned “reason”—the methods recommended by “Holy Church the Little”. This allowed the Church to pretend that this was just a work of mysticism, and not a heresy. Only mystics could know what it meant.
Marguerite listed in The Mirror Béguines, priests, clerks, Preachers, Augustinians, Carmelites, and Friars Minor as accusingher of error. That Béguines were among her critics shows she was attempting to straddle the divide between the Churches.
Lerner concludes that The Mirror describes such a union between the soul and God outside paradise, and such a state of passivity that denies the spiritual ministrations of the Church that they would have been rejected by most Catholic mystics. But grace not nature propels the soul toward God. Moreover, the libertine and licentious acts attributed by the Church to the Free Spirit are denied by omission. If Marguerite had entered a cloister like Mechthild of Magdeburg, with whom she is compared, she would have attracted little notice. Obviously, the Church could tolerate heretics who kept quiet about it.
The Decree of Vienne
In 1311, under Pope Clement V, the Béguines and Beghards were accused at the council of Vienne of being heretics who had a “spirit of liberty”, and decrees were passed suppressing their organization and demanding their severe punishment. A pope has to declare heresy as such, and the decree of Vienne made the Free Spirit a heresy. It censured women “commonly known as Béguines” who took no vows of obedience nor followed an approved rule. These women wore a special habit, and “as if insane” discoursed on the Trinity and the divine essence. The decrees were put into execution by Pope John XXII, and a persecution raged in which, though the pope protected the female Béguine communities of the Netherlands, the orthodox and unorthodox Béguines were not distinguished, but the secular authorities supported the Béguine communities against the Church.
The decree of Vienne listed eight errors of “an abominable sect of malignant men known as Beghards and faithless women known as Béguines in the Kingdom of Germany” considered to be Free Spirit heretics.
- People can attain perfection in earthly life and thus be incapable of sin. Any additional grace is impossible because it would confer on them a perfection superior to Christ.
- In this state, such a person need not fast or pray because in the perfect state sensuality is so subordinated to reason that they can accord freely to their body all that pleases them.
- Such a person is not subject to human obedience or to any laws of the Church because “where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor 3:17).
A further five propositions were consequences of the first three.
- People can attain final blessedness just as much in this life as in the other.
- People do not need the light of glory to be elevated to the vision and enjoyment of God.
- Acts of virtue are only necessary for imperfect men, but the perfect soul no longer needs them.
- A kiss is a mortal sin when nature does not demand it, but the sexual act itself is not sinful when demanded by nature.
- People need show no sign of reverence during the elevation of the host because to think of the sacrament of the Eucharist or the passion of Christ would be a sign of imperfection and a descent from the heights of contemplation.
Besides these horrors, the heretics did and said other things offensive to God, and perilous to souls. The decree concluded, the sect should be exterminated and those belonging to it punished according to the laws prescribed by the Church.
Had Beghards and Béguines actually expressed such errors? The Catholic Church imagined Free Spirits indulged in liberties after deification, yet Free Spirit writings give no evidence of self-indulgence or libertine conduct. Marguerite Porete’s “simple soul” was first a servant of the virtues and, after deification, their master, but Marguerite saw no conflict between them. Sister Catherine, after “becoming God”, sank into a trance then relaxed her discipline, but rejected the call to self-indulgence, preferring to remain humble. They were lords of the spirit not of the flesh, and far from the poor seeking wealth through it, the rich were abandoning their own wealth for apostolic rags. Free Spirits were generally ascetic in their pursuit of Perfection and both bodily and spiritual abnegation were necessary for deification. The austerities needed for Perfection precluded its use for material gain. Moreover, despite the supposed criminality of the Free Spirits, none on record were charged with theft or murder, and charges of licentious behaviour are hard to credit except in perverse sub-sects.
One source for these accusations seems to be the list in The Mirror of Simple Souls. The sixth article of the decree is almost the first tenet of Marguerite Porete. The eighth article matches one in Porete that the soul does not care for the consolations of God because such would disturb the concentration on divine union. Dispensation from fasting or prayer and justifying sexual intercourse if demanded by nature correspond in Porete that the annihilated soul can accord to nature all that it desires without remorse of conscience.
But these statements were taken out of context and do not represent fairly Marguerite’s views. Some tenets of the decree of Vienne are closer to Albertus Magnus denouncing the heretics of the Ries of forty to fifty years earlier. The first article of the former is an elaboration of Albertus’ article 94 that man can so advance in this life as to become “impeccable”.
Bishop John’s description has survived in only one copy, but there is another record of the examination in Strasburg surviving. In John of Durbheim’s letter of condemnation of 1317, he writes what they believed. Only a single copy exists but two manuscripts exist entitled, Articles and errors which were found in the inquisition made by lord John, Bishop of Strasburg, among those of the sect of Beghards and among those who adhere to them and shelter them, that cover almost the same ground:
God is all that exists and that man can be so united to Him that everything he does and wills is identical to divine action and will. Man can become God “by nature” without distinction, in which state he cannot sin. Such men comprise the kingdom of heaven and are unmovable: nothing can cause them to rejoice or be disturbed. They have no need to pray and since they are God they should be adored like God.
This adoration at the end of this passage is just what Cathars did to their own Perfects. Also like the Cathars, in Christology, they said not only that every perfect man is Christ “by nature”, but that any man could transcend him in merit. They did not revere his body, asserted that he was crucified not for mankind but for himself, and blasphemed against the consecration of the host, saying that a perfect man should be free from all acts of virtue and should not meditate on Christ’s passion or on God.
The Catholic Church and Christianity were foolish. The perfect man is free from all ecclesiastical precepts and statutes. He need not honor his parents nor work with his hands, and he can receive alms, even if not in orders, or indeed steal, since all property is held in common. Any good layman is more able to confer the Eucharist than a sinful priest, Christ’s body is found equally in all bread as much as in that of the altar, and confession is unnecessary for salvation. Under the same heading, though not directly related, is the interesting tenet that all sexual relations in marriage except those leading to offspring are sinful.
The list goes on to deny the existence of hell, purgatory, and last judgment. Man is judged on death, when his spirit or soul returns from whence it came, and nothing is left except God who exists eternally. Even Jews and Saracens are not damned, because their spirits also return to God. Believers should follow their own interior instincts. Some scripture contains no truth because it is merely imagery, and all the books of the Catholic faith could be destroyed and replaced by better ones.
Heretics supposedly claimed they could surpass the saints, were more perfect than the Virgin, could neither increase nor decrease in holiness, and had no need of faith, hope and charity. Finally, John’s letter says sexual relations even in marriage were sinful unless they led to propagation, but the inquisitorial list contains the contradictory statement that the free in spirit can do whatever they wish with their bodies without sin. Some additional differences are: The free in spirit need not observe the fasts of the Church and may eat meat on Fridays. A perfect woman need not obey her husband concerning acts of matrimony. Men, though healthy and strong, do not have to engage in bodily labour, even though by receiving alms they take that much away from the truly poor. And the state of freedom releases all from servitude including those who had been previously bound to a king or other lord.
Were Beghards, known until the fourteenth century for their extreme piety, really uttering all these outrageous tenets summed up by the statement that Christianity was mere foolishness? On the face of it, it appears astonishing that a group hitherto criticized primarily for unlicensed religiosity should so suddenly become avowedly licentious.
“God is formally all that is”, taken literally, contradicts that only some men could become God as a Perfect. In that they thought only the spiritual world of God was real, the material world being an illusion crated by the Devil, might be the truth. As in the case of the Cathar Inquisition, John’s inquisitors, probably Dominicans, had a crib sheet of leading questions to be asked based on a distortion of the heretics true views. That the body of Christ could be found in any bread meant that the bread of the altar was merely bread! The heretics were really disdaining the sacramental wafers. Expressed this way, it is attributed to the Amaurians of Paris in 1210 and was used by the wicked Guichard of Troyes a century later. That this bishop used this very accusation suggests that it could not be taken literally.
An important statement not in the earlier lists is the claim that all human spirits return to God whence they came. It is given as an heretical belief in Cologne at the same time as Bishop John’s examinations. The belief that parts of the Bible were only poetic was illustrated Matthew 25:32:
And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
The sheep on the right hand were to get the kingdom but the goats were to get the eternal flames. The heretics had no interest in eschatology believing that salvation was to be earned, and that Christ, the archangel Michael had already been with his salvific message and triumph over his brother, Satan.
